


some kind of nature

by sidnihoudini



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-27
Updated: 2010-04-27
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:16:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I mean, how hard is it to just go through life, and not sabotage every good relationship you come across?”  Zach complains, tucking the arm of his sunglasses into the V of his t-shirt.  “Did I ever tell you I broke up with Olivia for him?  Those are stunning, by the way.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	some kind of nature

_and I cast a spell over the west to make you think of me._

.

“You wanted him,” Olivia had said, with this little knowing smirk on her face, as she stood in the front doorway of Chris’ apartment. She’d had a half-empty shoebox full of little nothings pressed against her hip, and a ring of car keys rung in one hand. “You got him.”

Zach hadn’t known exactly what she’d meant, then, but, looking back now, he wonders when he ever got to be so stupid.

.

New York is a lot of things.

As an East-coaster by blood, Zach feels a little predisposed to it, anyways, but he’s always been a romantic at heart and New York is nothing if not a place for lovers. He knows he’s here for work, almost exclusively so, work and Big Gay Broadway, but he also wouldn’t mind it if there was another reason to keep his feet somewhere near the L Train.

The fact that he is suffering from a broken heart the minute the wheels of his plane touch tarmac shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is and he doesn’t know how else to make it change.

“Hey buddy,” Neal says, greeting him somewhere just past the arrivals gate.

Zach shifts his carry-on from one arm to the other so he can accept the customary bro-down-pat-hug warmly, and feels his mouth twitch into the tiniest of smiles for the first time in days.

New York City, he thinks, might be the start of something good.

.

They shoot every day for the first eleven days Zach is there. 

In fact, he figures that if he could somehow just coerce everyone into adding another three hours into their already eighteen count day, he might actually be able to get through one of them without thinking about Chris first.

Chris, who had sent him off from LAX by bumping Zach’s car tire into the curb at drop-offs, and offering a blank stare but not much else across the console separating their two seats.

Shaking his head, Zach clears his throat, and glances up from where he’s flicking through his text history. He and a few assorted production fiends are out for dinner, but his mind is about anywhere but Here, and everyone at the table knows it.

“So how’s life treating you anyway, Zach?” Trixze, unfortunate name but a really pretty face, and, moreover, Neal’s wife, asks, as one of her hands pause over the wide, salted rim of her margarita.

Zach makes a face and opts to ignore the way Neal jostles her underneath the table.

“Oh, you know,” He drones, rolling his eyes a little as he leans one elbow against the table top, and reaches for the little drink menu with his free hand. “Couldn’t be better.”

Which is actually now the biggest lie that Zach has told since he once said, “I won’t come in your mouth.”

Because, truthfully, things couldn’t actually be any worse, and have in fact been on a steady decline right since the night Zach broke up with his dumbass ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend for him, and somehow thought that shit might actually work out in his favor.

Karma is a bitch, and Zach is already starting to feel the full repercussions.

.

He’s standing on a residential sidewalk in lower Manhattan, wearing a pair of costume matador pants when Chris calls him for the first time.

 _“Just wanted you make sure you got there safe,”_ His voicemail garbles back at him, as Zach stands holding his capelet in one hand and tries to fend Philip off with the opposite elbow. _“I really miss you. And I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there. Noah misses you, too, and um, call me when you’re coming back.”_

Frowning, Zach deletes the message, and wonders when it became kosher to courtesy call two weeks too late to make sure that your ex-significant other arrived anywhere safely.

.

By some kind of divine intervention, Zoe ends up in Brooklyn for movie promotion the same day that Zach finds himself wandering through a nearby neighbourhood, scouting a location for the next bit they’re setting up to film.

“I mean, how hard is it to just go through life, and not sabotage every good relationship you come across?” Zach complains, tucking the arm of his sunglasses into the V of his t-shirt. “Did I ever tell you I broke up with Olivia for him? Those are stunning, by the way.”

Zoe pivots in front of the full-length mirror, and angles one foot to the side, eyeing the line of leather running up her calf.

“I defy you to find a pair of Louboutins that aren’t,” She grins, turning to the other side. She glances back at Zach over her shoulder. “You’ve gone into the Olivia fiasco many times, baby. I take it he’s still being a gigantic pussy, then?”

Grimacing at the intonation, Zach leans back against the wall, and keeps his gaze trained on the sharp, unbreakable point of her heel. He really should be wandering the streets, looking for a decent brownstone to film in front of.

“Calling him a pussy would be the understatement of this century,” He finally grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest. Zoe laughs as she takes a step towards Zach, and the litany of opened shoe boxes laid around him. Zach hesitates, and then adds, “I left him before I came here.”

Zoe freezes, hair cascading down to fall into her face as she stops dead, en route to one of the boot boxes.

“I’m sorry,” She starts, shaking her head as she looks over at him. “Say that one more time?”

Stomach churning, Zach shifts his arms against his chest, grimaces, and then glances at her, warning, “Don’t make me repeat it.”

“Sorry, I just…” She pauses and shakes her head, and then sits down heavily on the chunk of genuine Hermes Zach has been manning for the last half hour. “Are you okay? Jesus, Zach.”

Zach shrugs, and stares at the blank white wall stretching opposite them.

“Well,” He shrugs, sighing as he finally pushes away from the wall, and then pokes through the shoe boxes with his toes until he can sit next to her on the sofa. “I told the guy who I’m pretty sure is the love of my life to go and fuck himself on the 105, but… other than that…”

Then he tries to offer up his best, widest grin, but it falters halfway through -- right around the time that Zoe _doesn’t_ turn off her concerned best friend face. 

“Alright, well.” She turns to the sales woman hovering a few feet away, and gestures with one hand. “These boots are mine, and then we’re going for martinis.”

.

“So I guess you haven’t talked to him yet, hey?” Zoe asks, thumbing the sugared rim of her martini glass, as she leans over and reaches for the drink menu with her free hand.

Setting his own drink back down on the glass table top, Zach licks the tequila off of his lips, shakes his head, and picks up his iPhone without meaning to.

“I almost called him when I got into JFK. And he actually left me a voicemail on Wednesday,” He shrugs, all of a sudden preoccupied with scrolling through the few unread text messages he still has sitting in his Inbox. “You know, I’m terrified that this is actually it?”

Zoe smiles warmly at him over the curve of her martini glass, and raises one eyebrow.

“Little do you know, baby, that the great loves never end. If it’s meant to be, you better believe whether you want it to or not, it’ll happen,” She explains, sounding about as sure as he’s ever heard her regard a relationship other than her own.

Raising his eyebrows, Zach, momentarily distracted by her bold statement, asks, “Oh yeah? And what makes you figure that?”

”Nickie Ferrante and Terry McKay.” And of course, now she’s smiling with her mouth closed, her eyes wide and bright even in the dim candlelight between them. “The Empire State Building is the closest thing to heaven in this city.”

Zach smirks, eyes twinkling. “Nice speech, Eve, but I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart, y’know, you can always put that award where your heart ought to be.”

“Are you trying to school me on classic New York love stories, Pittsburgh?” Zoe laughs, loud and obviously very amused over the low thrum of the restaurant. The sheer shock on her face finally has Zach grinning from ear to ear, and it’s true and honest, and very well deserved by the boggled look she gives him. “You waited for the right man the first time, why didn’t you wait for the right man again?”

Laughing, now, Zach reaches for his napkin, and asks, “Did you just quote Moonstruck to me?”

”It made you smile,” Zoe replies, softly, expression sobering as she regards him tenderly.

Zach’s heart swells up until he’s almost sure that he can taste it, because he does smile, he finds himself unable to stop as he watches Zoe over the low haze of their table top.

“You know you make New York feel a little more like my home,” He finally says, as their waitress begins to clear the table behind Zach’s back.

Zoe makes a face at him as she reaches for her drink, and then they’re laughing, and Zach, for one whole minute, doesn’t think about Chris at all.

.

The next afternoon they wrap _Before After_ , which actually manages to come in on budget and ahead of schedule. Zach has just enough time to cab back to his hotel and change out of his clown makeup before he’s due at a premiere party, which is fine enough.

Looking back, though, he would probably change the part where he thought it was a good idea to go to the after-party alone, and get drunk on vodka tonics and beer.

.

“You were right,” Zach tells Olivia’s voicemail, at three o’clock in the morning, while he’s leaning up against the wall in the corridor outside a hotel room to keep from falling back down to the ground. “I got what I deserved, and I’m sorry that I did that to you.”

Hiccupping, he fumbles the door card key out of his jeans pocket, and comes to a stop outside of the wrong suite.

“He’s not your fight to win,” He continues, pausing to grumble under his breath when he swipes the key card, and the light blinks a resilient red. “What. New York is hard to get into.”

Then the phone slides out of his hand by accident, and not too soon after he gives up on the door altogether, letting himself shoulder along the wall until he actually ends up ass-down on the carpet, leaning back against the wall with both knees bent up in front of his torso.

His phone, glorious as it is, ends the call for him around the same time that he passes out with his head hung low, chin dipped closely against his chest.

.

The next morning, Zach wakes up three doors down from his own hotel room with a splitting headache, and a text message sent back from Olivia that reads, _I’m long over it, man. Sorry back atcha, though, sounds like you’re in love with a real dickmouth._

.

Zach nurses his hangover for a good twenty four hours before ending up back at Philip’s place in Brooklyn, he, Neal and a couple other writer-friends trying to hash out the last few scenes on the second script they need to finish.

“Where’s your head at, man?” Neal snaps quietly, when Zach ducks out for a cigarette and he takes the opportunity to follow, letting the front door close behind them with a soft whoosh.

Licking his lips, Zach shakes his head, and lights his Marlboro.

“Where is my head?” He repeats, sounding a little more hysterical than he’d actually meant to be as he inhales deeply, and turns around to face his friend. “Believe me, you really don’t want to know.”

Neal shakes his head, and crosses his arms against the light New York chill. To someone who has spent the better part of his formative years on the west coast of California, even it gets to be a bit too much, sometimes.

“I get that you left him there, alright?” Neal asks, his eyebrows raising as he takes an approach far more drastic than Zoe’s had been as he glares at Zach. “Believe me, I do. But you have to focus, alright? What do you think Chris is doing, anyway? Cause I’m pretty sure he isn’t acting like a lovesick moron who can’t keep his head in the game.”

Frowning, Zach pulls the cigarette from his dry mouth, and says, lips twitching into a bit of a hesitant smile despite himself, “Don’t call me a moron.”

.

After another eleven hours of writing and then scribbling out, and then typing and testing and reading and re-reading, Neal drops Zach off in front of the Whole Foods closest to his hotel.

“Remember what I said,” Neal warns him from the driver’s seat, even leaning forward over the center console to point an arbitrary finger at him.

Zach sighs, but stoops down low enough to be lectured.

“Give me a wake-up call in the morning,” He replies, instead of offering any semblance of an agreement, as he steps up onto the sidewalk and angles to close the door. “I’ll see you for lunch tomorrow.”

He swings the door closed and waves Neal off, already beginning to formulate a shopping list as he starts over to the massive automatic doors of the grocery chain.

.

Suffice to say that while Zach is traipsing across the lobby of his lower upper-high-class hotel, the last thing that he expects to see is Chris getting righteous with the woman at the front check-in desk, with one piece of luggage on the floor at his feet, and the other slung over his shoulder.

“Mr. Quinto,” The poor concierge girl says, looking particularly frazzled as she tries to push Chris’ various identification cards back at him, and apparently, not let Zach on to the fact that she’s trying to deal with a rich crazy.

Zach feels the blood drain out of his face; he’s never been one for public endearments.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Zach asks, at the exact same moment that Chris turns around and finally notices him standing there, completely motionless, and way too close to dropping his bag of tomatoes for either of their liking. 

Chris says, “She won’t let me have a key to your room.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Pine, but – ” The girl starts to apologize again, but nothing after that makes it past Zach’s radar, as his brain goes milky and too close to mush for his liking.

Zach looks down at Chris’ luggage one more time, and then the counter top, which has his passport, Californian driver’s license, and VISA. Without meaning to, Zach even notices the crooked, pushed back hat sitting on Chris’ head, and the spot where he must have nicked himself shaving this morning.

“Oh my god,” Zach intones, going light headed as he realizes.

Zoe, that bitch, was totally, irrevocably, _right_.

.

Their relationship thus far has, for the most part, been built on a trifecta of poorly timed attempts at getting together.

Zach finds it funny, deliciously so (and not to mention wildly appropriate) that only a few months after finally managing to get both of their dicks on the same page, they pussied out and left one another on opposite coasts.

Guess that’s what happens when you finally get the only thing you’ve ever really wanted: you freak out, and can’t help but drop it in absolute fear of ruining everything else.

“You didn’t return any of my calls,” Chris whispers at him, as Zach blinks, and refocuses on a piece of lint stuck to the back of their bellboy’s shoulder.

This is a wildly inappropriate conversation for an elevator.

“You left me one message,” Zach hisses back, unable to not reply, although he does so without turning to actually look at him.

Chris makes a face into the high gloss of the elevator stall, and Zach just keeps his head tilted back, watching as the floors ding by.

“Here we are,” The bellboy says, voice awkwardly too loud and self-aware as the doors slide open and the hotel corridor is unearthed before them. Zach really hopes that this doesn’t end up on the internet tomorrow.

Clearing his throat, Zach digs his wallet out and flips it open one handed as he juggles his grocery bag, and garbage bag full of unyielding thoughts. Despite his sudden lurch into the realm of Romantic Comedy, he manages to get a twenty out and hand it to the bellboy before the doors slide closed again.

“We should be okay from here,” He manages to say, albeit a little awkwardly, as Chris steps out of the elevator first, and then he’s left to pry Chris’ remaining bag from the bellboy’s grip. “Thanks, though.”

The bellboy eyes him, and then Chris.

“You’re welcome,” He says, and then the doors slide closed, leaving Zach and Chris in the corridor by themselves, Chris still a little flushed from his argument with the front desk attendant.

Zach pivots on one foot a little, and raises an eyebrow.

“You really thought she was just going to let you in?” He asks, wallet still unfolded and hanging limply from his hand.

Shrugging one shoulder, Chris looks over his shoulder, down the hall, and then back at Zach, desperately trying to not smirk as he says, “I didn’t think you would answer if I called you to explain.”

“You phoned _one time_ ,” Zach snaps, exasperated, before he catches onto the amused expression on Chris’ face, and can’t help his stomach from twisting into pleased little knots.

He desperately hopes that they aren’t still this dramatic when they’re middle-aged and trying to buy a condo in Malibu together.

.

They crack open a bottle of wine, and try to cram all of Zach’s groceries into the little mini-fridge hidden under the en suite counter.

“My sister couldn’t believe you broke up with me,” Chris grins, dropping an apple before he can make it all the way to the fridge with a half dozen of them held loose in his arms.

Zach raises his eyebrow, and reaches for his wine. “Neal lectured me in the car.”

“Olivia told me you drunk-dialed her,” Chris counters, setting the three apples that won’t fit into the fridge onto the counter island instead. The statement casts a quiet spell over the both of them, and Zach is suddenly a jumbled wreck. “I’m sorry I was such a reticent fuck to you before you left. I was just scared you were leaving at all.”

Making a sour face, Zach actually looks up, then, and says, “I was such a fucking mess when I got here, oh my god.”

“Yeah, well. I’m always terrified you’re gonna realize what a complete tool I am, man, and find something better,” Chris frowns, leaning heavily on the counter top with both hands, shoulders stooping low as the weight sinks in. He pauses, and regards Zach’s appearance for a moment. “New York looks really good on you, by the way.”

Zach cracks a smile and then pauses before he moves to set his wine glass down on the counter, sending another one of the apples rolling across the slate as he fumbles his way beside Chris.

“You really should have incorporated the Empire State Building into your big coast-to-coast proclamation of love,” He smirks, moving until they’re pressed hip to hip and suddenly Chris is just this warm invariable next to him, and not the stone-faced plebe he left in a Los Angeles parking lot.

Grinning for real, Chris leans in, until they’re almost lip to lip, and mumbles, “Next time, remind me about that. We’ll figure something out.”

”I get to find you next time,” Zach replies, quiet, and then they’re kissing, one of his hands on the back of Chris’ neck as they stand in this kitchen that isn’t their kitchen, and wait for the next proclamation to happen.


End file.
